After over 18 months of being a major force in the OpenSim hosting arena PXE is unfortunately suspending operations.

The PXE philosophy has always been to provide OpenSim hosting in as simple a form as possible while maintaining its pricing within reach of almost everyone. This was made possible by the personal investment by its founder into state of the art infrastructure, custom software solutions and virtualisation of the basic region servers.

Unfortunately while the PXE infrastructure has remained solid the OpenSimulator server software itself has started to consume larger and larger amounts of server resources. In light of this the virtualisation platform used to keep the ‘Customer (Region)’ servers at a reasonable price is no longer a viable option. This problem leaves us with only one way to go with the customer servers and that is to run dedicated machines. As the cost of dedicated machines makes PXE packages beyond the reach of most people especially given the current economical climate we have decided the best course of action is to suspend our platform until such time when we can offer products are ‘affordable’ prices again.

Note that the OSgrid software is being completely rewritten at the moment, including getting rid of some of the underlying SL code (from what I understand from chatting with the people I rent four sims from -- they are key OSgrid admins and developers).

I don't have enough information and experience yet to know. My SIM has 2,000+ prims in it now. Currently I have almost no in-world-scripts running, that will change. The load on my machine is very light. There are about 25 to 30 threads running. Of course there is almost never anyone in the age. CPU use is almost invisible. When brand new, nothing built within the SIM, the memory allocation was light, 5 or 10mb. When I transferred in my stand-alone build that went up to 15mb +/-. With 2,000+ prims the current requirement is 28mb. When I backup the SIM it now uses about 26mb of disk. However, my resource monitor shows 132mb of ram currently dedicated to OpenSim and another 30 +/- mb to MySQL.

When I am in SIM most of the CPU load is from my viewer. So, I haven't seen what part is the SIM and which the viewer. I'll have to open up a monitor and watch.

I have a low ping in my SIM... I'm going from my machine (viewer) to my machine (SIM), usually 30ms, which seems high for a local connection. But, my SL connections tend to be in the 80 to 250 ms range. However on Mat's machine running 4 regions, I think, it is typical to see the ping hit 1,000+ to 12,000ms... which makes it almost impossible to do anything in world. If everyone stands still for a few seconds it seems to recover. I'll have to ask him about CPU and memory loads. The 4 hosted Devokan regions have better performance.

I'm using the OSGrid's remote Assets Server. That splits the load. I've not yet looked to see how it handles all the textures and meshes. I seem to have a copy of everything in the SIM. I see the SIM software receiving and sending assets from and to the remote server. I would have to dig into the source to see what they are doing.

My personal inventory is greater than the SIM's, about 36mb. I do see the SIM updating my inventory from the remote OSGrid servers when I enter the region.

OpenSim is Alpha level software, so I expect it to get more efficient. However, the number of SIM's that can run in a server is likely going down. I suspect Blue Mars is getting their performance (1,000 concurrent avatars, mega prim regions) by throwing servers at the region/SIM. SL puts 4 low performance regions per server. SL has things split up so that is not a pure number. They have separated login, assets, permissions, etc. I have one region and use at least three servers; OSGrid logon, assets, and possibly a transaction authorization server, all in addition to my machine running the region.

I can run totally stand alone. I have my local home SIM still installed and running. I update it from time to time to keep it sync'd with my OSGrid region. With just me in it and my being alone there I get great performance. I'll have to try putting it on the net sans OSGrid and see how it preforms. I have to figure out how to handle logons and authorization to assets. Otherwise I have to manually set up the user account.

I am curious how MOULa is currently setup. We know that there has been an authorization/login server, one running the age/SIM, and the data server providing the initial copy of the game files. The users' computers actually do most of what the OpenSim asset servers handle, providing the meshes and textures. I suppose that all the non-client stuff can fit into a single server just as my standalone SIM does.

I was watching the resource meters when Mat came over to visit. I had some 7-8% CPU spikes and network traffic stepped up. I would guess my machine would max out at about 20 users and be lagging them. May be on a Sunday I can have a crowd over...

50 in a server, and that is logon too? kewl
I assume age download is from another server, or the same?

Revisiting this thread a year later, I am now running 15 regions on a hosted virtual machine -- admittedly about half of these are 'sea' or lightly built on to enable the main areas (which have between 5k to 7k prims) to 'breathe'.

We don't get vast crowds; the regions tend to be visited by solitary explorers or small groups of three or four at a time.